South Korean film “Noise” is a little disturbing horror flick about one noisy and spooky apartment building. If you are familiar with many other South Korean apartment horror movies such as “Possessed” (2009), you will know what you are going to get here, and the movie will not disappoint you at all as providing a fair amount of good moments of horror and dread.

After the disturbing opening scene, we are introduced to Joo-yeong (Lee Sun-bin), a young female factory worker with hearing impairment who has lived apart from her younger sister Joo-hee (Han Su-a) for a while due to a personal reason. She and Joo-hee lived together in one old apartment building, but they clashed with each other as Joo-hee became quite neurotic about the noises she often heard from somewhere in the apartment building, and Joo-yeong eventually decided to leave the apartment alone for avoiding more conflict with her younger sister.

On one day, Joo-yeong is notified that her younger sister suddenly disappeared without any trace, so she immediately goes to their apartment, and she is more baffled as there is no evident reason for her younger sister’s disappearance. Although it is clear that Joo-hee kept getting annoyed by those noises as before, she was also preparing for her older sister’s upcoming birthday right before her disappearance, and Joo-yeong becomes all the more determined to find any clue to her younger sister’s whereabouts.

However, most of the neighbors in the apartment building are not so friendly to say the least for understandable reasons. Many of them want their apartment building to be demolished and then reconstructed as soon as possible for their economic benefit, and these people are certainly ready to suppress the disappearance of Joo-yeong’s younger sister as much as they can, just because it may seriously jeopardize the approaching chance for the reconstruction.

Not so surprisingly, it is soon revealed to Joo-yeong that her younger sister’s disappearance may be a mere tip of whatever is going on inside the apartment building. While their apartment actually turns out to have a disturbing past, there is also a very disturbed man living in the apartment right below theirs, and he becomes more and more threatening to Joo-yeong as he complains more than once about the noises supposedly heard from Joo-yeong and her younger sister’s apartment.

While quite scared and flabbergasted about his increasingly menacing complains, Joo-yeong also begins to hear strange sounds just like her younger sister did. These sounds seem to come from the apartment right above theirs, but then she is told later that that apartment has actually been empty during last several months. As she gets more nervous day by day, she also comes to have a series of nightmares, and that makes her become more aware of the possibility of some malevolent presence lurking somewhere inside the apartment building.

Around that narrative point, you will probably have some good idea about whatever is happening around our heroine – especially when she eventually decides to check out a certain dark (and stinking) place right under the apartment building later in the story. I like one brief moment which is basically a variation of a certain well-known genre cliché (No, it is not a cat this time, by the way), and I also appreciate how the movie utilizes its heroine’s disability for more terror and suspense in a way not so far from “Wait Until Dark” (1967).

During the last act, the movie falters a bit as throwing its heroine into more horror and panic as required, but it is still held well together thanks to its palpably spooky atmosphere surrounding the story and characters. While the apartment building in the film looks more ominous with its shadowy corners, the supporting characters in the film contribute more dramatic tension to the story as required, and there are a couple of surprises for us as our heroine discovers a bit more about some of these characters.

The movie surely depends a lot on the presence and talent of its lead actress, and Lee Sun-bin gives a strong performance to carry the film to the end. Even when the movie falters a bit during its last act, Lee’s good efforts continue to our attention, and we come to care more about her character’s risky journey into fear and darkness as dreading more for the worst. In case of several substantial supporting performers in the film, Han Su-a, Kim Min-seok, Jeon Ik-ryung, and Baek Joo-hee are also well-cast in their respective roles, and they effectively support Lee in one way or another along the story.

On the whole, “Noise”, which is incidentally the first feature film of director Kim Soo-jin, is a modest but fairly solid horror movie, and it certainly scared and entertained me and several other audiences around me enough at last night. As I walked out of the screening room along with them, some of them joked that they were afraid of going back to their apartments, and I could not help but amused by that as reflecting a bit on my current solitary life in a new apartment building. Yes, I have sometimes heard the noises from the apartment above mine during last several months, but these noises are not that loud at least, and I guess I should be thankful that they are not insidious at all.